Monday, May 18, 2009

MAY BLOG

I know we're only in the middle of May and it almost feels like summer to me! Temperatures are up, the sky’s are BLUE, birds are singing, flowers are blooming and showing their beautiful colors. I spent the whole day watching my husband and the boys work in the yard. I prepare some of my Homemade Lemon Aid and Sweet Tea to keep them happy. Boy! I'm happy, it will be ready for Memorial Day cook out. Our family always comes together Memorial Day to honor our love one so we will never forget them.
What cookin’ this month, a few summer dishes, favorite back yard party menus, and great picnic lunches to take with you to the beach, park, sporting events, and afternoon in the park concerts or movies.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

WHAT IS SOUL FOOD

In the mid 1960's when the civil Right Movement was just beginning, terms like soul man, soulful and just soul were used in connection with blacks. It caught on with main stream American and someone coined the term, soul food for the black cuisine and it stuck. My dad said when they gave pork the name soul food the price of pig parts and pig inners double in price and everything the Government though was soul food the price was double and that was the end of low cost PIG PARTS.

Each black family, however, has it’s own idea of what is soul food.
Today most people think of soul food, is a table heavy with trays of watermelon, ribs, candied sweet potatoes or yams, greens and fried chicken. Hogshead cheese sliced on saltine crackers with hot sauce and beer is one such dish. Crab cakes, carrot and raisin salad, fried cornpone, hush puppies, red beans and rice, greens, liver and onions, lima beans with ham hogs, stewed okra and tomatoes, cornbread dipped in buttermilk, fried catfish, smothered chicken, pickled pigs feet, cabbage, neck bones, tongue, chittlin’s, tripe, gumbo, breaded fried pork chops with a mess of green, black-eyed peas…..…… and grits. Although grits is truly a southern dish.

Our family idea of soul food cooking is how really good southern
Black Cooks, cooked. They would cook with what they had available to them; such as chickens from their own back yard and collard greens they grew themselves, as well as home cured ham, and baking powder biscuits, chitlins and other pig parts.